August 12-13, 2006—The Point of Wisconsin’s
Beginnings
Wisconsin’s nickname is the Badger state and this
weekend we found out why.
Maybe it’s because we are from the west and have
not really traveled in depth this far east before, but it sure seems to us as
though the entire state is filled with a beautiful array of old buildings. I
mean, it’s not just one old preserved special town, but its small town, after
small town, after small town…every place we drive through has a preserved
downtown core consisting of very old buildings and lovely old homes. People
would kill for this stuff on the west coast and its ridiculously cheap here. The
current trophy homes have nothing on these old mavens as they are huge and speak
to when Wisconsin must have been a pinnacle of wealth during the 1800’s and
early 1900’s.
We’re loaded up and ready for an early start by 7:30 on Saturday as we head south on the super slab to make time, with an eventual destination of Mineral Point. Mineral Point sits in southwest Wisconsin, quite some distance from us and on the way I plan for us to also hook up with a campsite.
This portion of Wisconsin is known as the
driftless area since it didn’t get invaded by the massive glacial covering which
ground down the other parts of the state; a grinding so severe that the soil is
now literally sand to a depth of 25 feet in parts here in Stevens Point. The
driftless area still has rocks and much of the hilly terrain is limestone strata
just a few feet underneath. This limestone held great riches for early
miners—lead. Wisconsin was first settled by those miners as they drifted into
the area and Henry Dodge arrived in 1827 and started hauling out ore. By 1830
Mineral Point was a boom town, one of Wisconsin’s first. Today it’s a step back
in time, filled with amazing old architecture and a lovely preserved living
history museum known as Pendarvis, which is a small village of the restored
original cottages built by the Cornish miners who settled here. The entire town
is so special it was Wisconsin’s first historic district placed on the National
Register.
But, back to the highway. We peel off the slab onto Hwy. 78, which winds through some lovely hill country and renown small towns like Prairie de Sac (home to award-winning Wollersheim Winery), Sauk City and on past some fabulous yard art, which causes Marc to do a U turn on the bike so we can take photos. Highway 78 starts really undulating across the small hills and valleys as we drop south of Mt. Horeb and becomes the true meaning of “crossing hill and through dale” as we pull over in the parking lot of a 1854 Lutheran church and cemetery to look at the map. Corn fields stretch endlessly.
Miles on, we pull over again only to be helped by a local who says the campground we are looking for we have long since passed but he has suggestions for others. Some roads are closed, we do the detour trick, and end up looking for the municipal campground in the small town of Darlington, only about 15 miles north of the Illinois border. We pull in to a lovely campground pretty full of both tenters and RVs and more ATVs than we can count. Not entirely happy at a municipal campground when I had visions of a state campground in a forest, we nonetheless figure we’d better grab what’s available since it is now nearly 2 p.m. We have come much farther than we planned on very slow, curvy roads, but it is part of the journey on a motorcycle and there is always tomorrow if we miss what we came to see today. The journey means more than the destination when you are traveling by bike! We drop the trailer and take off for Mineral Point, now only 12 miles north.
Darlington itself is quite historic and proves to be an excellent walking town. If you go, the municipal campground seems to primarily be used by young families with ATVs, but it does feature large sites, sits right on the river in the middle of town so is easy walking distance to anything of note, and is only $10 without electric or $15 with electric. There is a small bath house with one shower each gender.
Our first stop in Mineral Point is Pendarvis, where for $8 each we get a guided tour of the interior of several buildings (no flash photography allowed). The cottages are arrayed along the hillside on Shake Rag Street, right across from the mining activity at the time. Today, it is a bucolic setting guarded over with huge trees and colorful Phlox but in its day, it appeared stripped barren and ugly. The Cornish miners, hearing of the lead strike, thronged here in droves and with no where to live when they first arrived, they dug holes in the limestone cliff sides for shelter, thus coming to be nicknamed “badgers”. Ah ha, the nickname given to the state as well. Pendarvis was purchased and restoration started in the 1930’s. The first cottages date from 1836 so are quite historic.
Our next stop is the downtown of Mineral Point, now a Mecca of art galleries and artists just scant blocks away from Shake Rag Street. We stop for a snack and ice tea at the Red Rooster, which also boasts Cornish pasties and is housed in a late 1800’s bank building with original tin ceiling and wood floors. I marvel that they sell a roast beef sandwich for only $3.50. When have you seen a price like that lately? The town is hilly and reminds me a little of Grass Valley in California only without the hordes of tourists. Yes, there are a few here, but I stand in the middle of the street to snap pictures and muse over the antiquities. One of the great finds: this zinc dog, which has hung for 130 years. It originally promoted the large and elegant Gundry & Gray department store and since the owners were from Cornwell, they used the typical British method of identifying stores with animals. This is a small town not to be missed if you’re anywhere near the area.
Sunday we do something we normally don’t do on our camp trips—cook breakfast ourselves. Maybe it was the frying bacon I’m sending wafting through the air, but as the first ones to arise in camp, we are soon joined by others as camp comes alive after 7 a.m. and lots of the ATVers start packing up. Quite a few are from Illinois so probably have long drives home. We get underway ourselves about 8:30 with a quasi-destination of Cooksville, lying somewhere to the northwest using the back roads. It is a spectacular morning and the riding is superb with very little traffic.
Cooksville is supposed to feature a nice walking tour where over 80% of the structures are from the 1800’s but when we get there and talk with the nice gal in the only business, the Cooksville General Store, she says there really isn’t a walking tour anymore and there really doesn’t appear to be that many structures we can see either. The Cooksville store has been in business for 160 years and is quite a historic structure in itself, but unfortunately because it has no indoor plumbing (thus no sanitary facilities) the state closed down every section that required non-processed food, i.e. the meat and cheese counter, produce, even the old coffee grinder where you could buy bulk coffee to have ground. I’m sure these old walls have some great stories to tell and note the operational one gas pump outside right on the porch and the original old pickup still in the parking lot.
I’ve chosen SR73 as a back route alternative to the freeway for our return home (what we love about this state—it has a ton of good, traffic-free roads) and just before lunch we see an ultralight coming in for a landing on a grass field with a hanger structure with a big sign that says Skydiving School so we do a quick flip into the parking lot and dismount. We end up talking to the guy who steps from the new ultralight, an instructor getting time on his new machine. Meanwhile, we also get to witness several people learning to skydive so all in all it makes a serendipitous lunch stop for us. Back on the highway and a few more detours (Wisconsin has a problem with many road bridges being washed out or repaired it seems) we make it home just as it starts bagging up getting ready to rain. Whew, we’ve put on 430 of the slow, winding kind of miles. Yeah, 10-4, that’s a big smile.
